14 DAY TRIAL // In the last few weeks, we've been hearing quite a few rumors related to a Snapdragon 815 chip from Qualcomm. The supposed new chip was said to be the next in line to be released by the company and we even got to look at some possible specs of the purported silicone piece.
A tipster revealed that the Snapdragon 815 would arrive with four Cortex A72 and four Cortex A52 cores on a big.LITTLE architecture.
We were told the new chip would supposedly be made using the new FinFet process (probably 16nm) and would be outfitted with Qualcomm’s next-gen Adreno GPU.
There is no such thing as the Snapdragon 815
Well, all this information seems to have been for naught, as a new report coming out of Fudzilla reveals something completely unexpected. The publication says it talked to Qualcomm’s own Senior Director of Public Relations Jon Carvill, who disclosed that the Snapdragon 815 simply did not exist. And he was pretty clear about it.
Word related to the Snapdragon 815 surfaced not so long ago and spread like wild fire all over the Internet. Even alleged benchmarks focused on the Snapdragon 815 surfaced, showing that, once released, the chip would run much cooler than both Snapdragon 801 and Snapdragon 810.
But now, the Qualcomm official exposes all this as fabricated evidence for a SoC that simply does not exist in the real world.
Snapdragon 820 will be the next high-end chip
So, we should make things very clear: the Snapdragon 810 won’t be replaced by the Snapdragon 815. The successor of this particular chip will actually be the Snapdragon 820, which the US chip maker briefly mentioned at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
However, we shouldn't be holding our breath for seeing this piece of silicone embedded in consumer devices anytime soon. After all, chip development isn't a simple affair and designing / producing a new one from scratch takes a lot of time.
Qualcomm says the first samples are expected sometime in the second half of the year, so if everything goes according to plan without any hindrances, we might get to see the first Snapdragon 820-powered devices by the end of the year. Even so, most products based on the new chip will probably start shipping in early 2016.